It’s all about sustainability — yesterday, today, tomorrow
Two years removed from the Santa Fe Area Home Builders Association leadership as its executive officer, it may be time for a new tag at the end of this column. Lately I’ve simply referred to myself as a sustainability consultant.
The word “sustainability” is convenient because it captures anything and everything — and therefore, it can be argued, nothing. Fifteen years ago, when typing it out using Microsoft Word, red zigzags appeared under it, meaning it was unrecognizable as a legitimate word.
“Sustain” has long been accepted as a verb, as has “sustainable” as an adjective. But “sustainability” as a noun, of sorts, is pretty recent. Google says it was first used in the context of the environment around 1972, shortly after the first Earth Day in 1970.
Wikipedia will confound a definition searcher, although it does admit, “Modern use of the term sustainability is broad and difficult to define precisely.” Which is why we like it. Santa Fe has been an advocate of the term and created a Sustainable Santa Fe Commission over 20 years ago.
The commission’s activity has waxed and waned over the years, but its most recent iteration created a 25-year sustainability plan adopted by the city in 2018 that focused on 91 different aspects. That plan built upon a 2008 city-adopted plan that had fewer than a dozen areas of focus.
Clearly, sustainability is broad and getting broader.
As a member of the Sustainable Santa Fe Commission from 200610, I helped draft the 2008 plan and made sure building homes — sustainably, of course — was part of the fabric of our town’s sustainability intentions. Some members of the commission were reluctant to see homebuilding as anything other than destructive to our local environment and the planet, but they grudgingly came to accept housing as a human right, as long as it was done sustainably.
These days I argue for the sustainability of an industry that reflexively resists sustainability. Caught in the middle between those who say growth in the water-starved Southwest is not sustainable and those who say we can build homes and communities that have net-zero energy and net-zero water usage, it is a head-snapping dichotomy because both are true.
In 35 years of observing and participating in Santa Fe’s residential development, the plaintive wail of “where’s the water coming from?” is never far from the lips of somebody at a public meeting or from the fingertips of a letters-to-the-editor writer. The fact is, we know where it’s coming from. The same place it has always come from and always will: the sky.
The question, and it’s a legitimate one, is: “How can we best use what we get?”
To that question, there are myriad answers. It is definitely an all-of-the-above scenario.
We are short of housing. To ensure sustainable affordability we need more of it and soon. The fact that our total aggregate water consumption has declined dramatically over the past two decades, even as we have built thousands of new homes, is testament to our commitment to sustainability. It wasn’t through magic or by depriving existing residents of their needs. It was because builders working with policymakers figured out how to do it.
Santa Fe knows how to do it. Our challenge is getting other communities in the Southwest to follow suit. That’s where sustainability consultants can help.
Kim Shanahan has been a Santa Fe green builder since 1986 and a sustainability consultant since 2019. Contact him at shanafe@aol.com.